Marketing of products and services through the use of coupons, brochures, labels, cereal boxes and lottery tickets is undoubtedly very effective in increasing awareness of consumers of companies and products. One useful way to market a product is to provide a valuable prize if a person has a winning number. The vendor may only be able to give several of the prizes without losing money. In this circumstance, preventing counterfeiting becomes important.
Steganography allows information to be placed in a hidden way in these instruments. A steganographic signal can be embedded in a picture, removing the need for bar codes or other explicitly printed accounting information. The value of this is that the packaging becomes more esthetically pleasing and the consumer is likely to be more interested in using the instrument.
Today's steganographic technologies are very robust to surviving the print scan cycle or other adverse process such as markings, tears, compression, smoothing, noise, etc. This poses a problem in the case of a lottery or coupon with a prize because the ticket can be scanned and reprinted, and the steganographic signal will be maintained, allowing the user to win with a counterfeit instrument and win a second time with the original instrument. Similarly, in many countries, forgery of brand name consumables such as whiskeys, cigarettes and cereals is rampant. With today's steganographic techniques, without other measures, simply copying an authentic label using a scanner and a printer is sufficient enough to guarantee the authentication of the embedded signal of the copied label.
A powerful technique that can be used for these kinds of steganographic instruments is disclosed in copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/613,989. A method is disclosed that enables the use of paper or textured media to be authenticated based upon an embedded signal derived from the textural attributes of the media. A carrier is formed by scanning a region or multiple regions of the media and is convolved with a message to form an authenticable signal. After scanning, the carrier is subdivided and rearranged in ways that prevents a person from “discovering” the carrier. The drawback with this method is that it requires a scan of the media before a picture containing the steganographic signal is printed. This presents a loss of efficiency for companies already producing authenticable instruments because their existing workflow needs to be changed.
The present invention provides a solution to these problems.